Dr. Deming on Innovation

Dr. Deming is well known for urging companies to bring a scientific rigor to their management practices. For that reason, some people remember his primary emphasis being on control charts and PDSA and using data to validate decisions and drive improvement. It is true that he preached the importance of using this thinking to improve. However, that was only one aspect of his teachings.

You will run across writing online discussing the need to move beyond limited focus on the numbers as a reason to “move beyond” Dr. Deming. This makes little sense. Dr. Deming understood the importance of innovation and creativity. His management system emphasized the importance of focusing on these areas. His thoughts on that importance was not hidden away, it was at the core of what he taught. For example, on page 10 of the New Economics:

The moral is that it is necessary to innovate, to predict needs of the customer, give him more. He that innovates and is lucky will take the market.
…
No defects, no jobs. Absence of defects does not necessarily build business… Something more is required.

Does the customer invent new product of service? The customer generates nothing. No customer asked for electric lights… No customer asked for photography… No customer asked for an automobile… No customer asked for an integrated circuit.

Dr. Deming was not focused solely on improving the efficiency of a manufacturing plant. No matter what you read online, just a few pages into his book it is obvious he saw the need for a much different vision of leadership. In this blog we hope to continue to explore the full scope of his management philosophy.

Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his version of empathy—an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers.

This is exactly how Dr. Deming felt. People that attempt to view Dr. Deming as the management expert that focused on the importance of data find this confusing. They figure Dr. Deming would support using a completely metric driven approach to judge what the company should be doing. That isn’t what Dr. Deming taught though, as the quotes above illustrate and as the entire management system make abundantly clear.

What you need to do is know your customers (and potential customers) and business so well that you can innovate to meet their unmet needs (even when those potential customers can’t give voice to what they would like to see).

8 Comments

I’m a 5th grade teacher in Seattle and just returned from the fall conference. I’m really excited about this blog and the entrance of the Deming Institute into the web 2.0 world. This is a great opportunity to increase learning and understanding through the sharing of ideas.

“The problem with disruptive innovation is it pays off in 5 to 10 years and it uses capital… [Investments in efficiency innovation pay] off in 1 to 2 years and it creates more capital… occasionally a little bit of capital goes up into disruption. But in America in the last 20 years the number of disruptive innovations that our economy has produced is about a third the number of disruptive innovations that emerged in our economy in the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s.”

[…] we have to start is with our products and our services, not with our marketing department. … Quality isn’t just the product or service. Its having the right product. Knowing where the market is going and having the most innovative products is just as much a part of […]

Just knowing your customer is not enough in innovation. Dr. Deming’s famous retort that “no one ever asked for a light bulb.” Creativity and Design can and will lead us to unthought of types of innovation.

[…] to have happy customers?” he asked in his characteristically deep, gravelly voice. “The customer never invented anything. The customer generates nothing. He takes what he gets.” … After the working group […]